Topsight > Getting to topsight in your organization

Earlier this week I wrote a guest column on topsight for Life and Letters, a magazine published by UT's College of Liberal Arts. In particular, I discussed how organizations develop incompatible solutions that exacerbate systemic problems:

People are constantly “hacking” their work, grabbing unofficial solutions from other parts of their lives in order to solve their problems, increase their capabilities and lessen their work. When they do this, they inject some much-needed flexibility into the system—they find ways to route around the limitations and improve the capabilities of what could otherwise be an inflexible, one-size-fits-all system. That sticky note or list is sometimes the hidden linchpin of their work—the thing that allows them to productively use the database, coordinate with coworkers or track their tasks. 

That’s the good news. But the bad news is that these ad hoc solutions can block information flow, precisely because they are so customized.

Beyond that bad news, there's good news too. You can achieve topsight into the organization, figuring out how to identify ad hoc solutions—and understand what they're trying to solve. If you're trying to figure out how to apply topsight, or how to explain it to others in your organization, take a look.

Topsight > How Fredrik is using Topsight

We're wrapping up our discussion of Topsight on Inkwell, and Fredrik Matheson was kind enough to discuss how his team is using Topsight at Bekk Consulting. Click through to see the whole comment, but here's a part that I wanted to pull out:

That's why we bake Topsight into our process and use it in the right context. We're lucky – most of our teams work at the clients' locations for months or years, so getting access to the right people isn't *too* hard. Our interviews are aimed at the micro- and meso-level details of the work, not the work culture itself. We're looking for disruptions and breakdowns – stuff *we* can fix – and if we uncover a problem that has more to do with how things are organized, what kinds of people are hired, the incentive structures and so on, we hand that over to our clients. 

Topsight also lends itself well to people-and-process-intensive projects like intranets, collaboration tools and case management.
...
I hope *everyone* working on tools for sharing and collaborating and in Enterprise 2.0/social business projects will read Topsight. We can't make things work better if we don't understand how they work. 

Yes. Yes. Topsight is not a substitute for usability testing, prototyping, or other well-used approaches, but it does pull together details that those other approaches don't. It represents another tool in the toolkit, one that UX teams can use in the right situation. More thoughts at the link.

Topsight > Upcoming seminars in Austin

I've been excited about opportunities to discuss my new book Topsight, which describes how to get a big-picture view of an organization so that you can diagnose and fix information flow issues. These issues plague just about every kind of organization.

Reading the book will help you get your head around the approach I use. But you can get much more hands-on practice if you come take my seminars. I'm offering two this summer through the Information Institute:

• TOPSIGHT PART 1: Discovering how information flows in your organization. This May 25 seminar will introduce you to the basics of designing and conducting a field study at your organization, then organizing your data.
• TOPSIGHT PART 2: Analyzing and fixing how information flows in your organization. This June 22 seminar will help you make sense of the field data, modeling it so that you can better understand systemic issues in your organization.

Both seminars are going to be a lot of fun. For more, click through, and don't hesitate to contact me with questions.

(the social layers)

Recently I argued that college students are learning and writing in a mind-boggling range of genres, including electronic genres, and that these include "an increasing number of social layers on top of their work, leisure, and family genres." True. But let's drill deeper into this notion of social layers.

What social layers? Consider this experience, which I reported to someone earlier today in an email:

When I was working on my PhD (1994-1999), we knew almost nothing about grad students in other programs. We would see them once a year, at CCCC, and we would eye them like the Jets eyed the Sharks. They were competitors. Now, grad students in different programs are all Facebook and Twitter friends. 

The difference is that social networking made it a lot easier for people to network with each other—networking became cheaper, easier, and more quotidian. Collaborative writing software such as Google Docs has similarly lowered the barrier to scholarly collaboration across time and distance. And mobile phones have meant a terminal in your pocket—collaboration can happen anywhere. So we see a shift from closed, institutional structures to open, networked ones. This change is happening in academia, of course (we’re prime candidates for using these technologies), but also in most other aspects of our society.

Social networking provides a social layer that connects today's grad students, both within their own institution and across institutions. Other publicly available online services such as Google Docs, Basecamp, and Facebook allow teams to collaborate, coordinate, and communicate easily—once again, both within an organization and across organizational barriers. In fact, we're seeing an increasing number of studies examining how these additional layers affect work. These change how we work, but also how we intuit each other's moods and availability, how we see each other's contextual activity, and how we manage collaborative complexity. They even change how we structure our organizations, making it feasible to make them smaller, nimbler, flatter, and more distributed. They provide an always-on switchboard for working groups.

That doesn't mean that this social layer is unproblematic. It can be very problematic. But it's pervasive, and it's going to continue to have a big impact on how we do business.

Reading :: The Invention of Primitive Society

The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion
By Adam Kuper

"This book is a history of the ways in which anthropologists have thought about primitive society," Adam Kuper declares on p.1 of this book. Kuper argues that, although the study of primitive society in the late 19th century and beyond tended to invoke Darwin, it was actually Lamarckian in its interpretation: Darwinism doesn't imply any sort of progress, but Lamarckian ideas of evolution do. And early anthropologists seized on the notion that societies were progressing, more or less universally, from one state to another (p.2).

Indeed, Kuper argues, Europeans looked around at their society in the late 19th century and saw fundamental transformations from the familiar "traditional society" to the "new world" (industrialism, capitalism, bureaucracy). And "behind this 'traditional society' they discerned a primitive or primeval society," Kuper tells us (p.4). But

in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror. For them modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefore must have been nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist. There also had been a progression in mentality. Primitive man was illogical and given to magic. In time he had developed more sophisticated religious ideas. Modern man, however, had invented science. Like their most reflective contemporaries, in short, the pioneer anthropologists believed that their own was an age of massive transition. They looked back in order to understand the nature of the present, on the assumption that modern society had evolved from its antithesis. (p.5)

By the end of the 1800s, most anthropologists believed that

1. "The most primitive societies were ordered on the basis of kinship relations." (p.6)
2. "Their kinship organization was based on descent groups." (p.6)
3. "These descent groups were exogamous and were related by a series of marriage exchanges." (p.6)
4. "These primeval institutions were preserved in fossil form," i.e., if one were to find a relatively untouched society in a remote place, their society could be taken to represent ancient societies that predated the state. (p.7)
5. "with the development of private property, the descent groups withered away and a territorial state emerged." (p.7)

He adds:

But hardly any anthropologist alive today would accept that this classic account of primitive society could be sustained. On the contrary, the orthodox modern view is that there never was such a thing as "primitive society." Certainly no such thing could be reconstructed now.  ... Human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin, and there is no way of reconstituting prehistoric social forms, classifying them, and aligning them to a time series. There are no fossils of social organization. (p.7)

Nor could it be generalized. Even "surviving hunter-gatherers certainly do not conform to a single organizational type" (p.7). He further argues that ecological variations affect social organization, so "there must have been considerable differences in social structure between the earliest human societies" (pp.7-8).

He concludes: "The theory of primitive society is on a par with the history of the theory of aether. The theory of primitive society is about something which does not and never has existed" (p.8).

The rest of the book is Kuper's attempt to examine how the theory of primitive society developed, how it spread, and why it persists (p.8). Throughout the book, he describes the history of this theory in anthropology, examining its persistence through patriarchal theory (Ch.2), Lewis Henry Morgan's notions of ancient society (Ch.3), totemism (Ch.4-5), taboo (Ch.6), the Boasians (Ch.7), Rivers and his critics (Ch.8-9), and descent theory (Ch.10). I'm often interested in these sorts of metatheoretical histories, so I found the discussion riveting, especially since it put many of my anthropological readings in relation to each other and to a shared timeline.

Let's close with one intriguing passage. In Ch.6, "Totemism and Taboo," Kuper examines Durkheim's impact, especially his evolutionism, which "owed much to Spencer and nothing to Darwin." And:

Spencer believed that all societies shared a common point of origin. Moreover, the original institutional forms were never lost, but were simply recombined in various, more complex, new forms. (This was a form of social Lamarckism. ...) Durkheim further concluded from these premises that institutions could be most easily understood in their simplest, original form, and that if they were studied in a primitive state their relations with other institutions would be most readily apparent. (p.114).

 A thought-provoking book, well written and with a broad sweep. I'm still processing it. If you're interested in anthropology, societies, or societal organization, take a look.

Reading :: What Kinship is—and is Not

What Kinship Is—And Is Not
By Marshall Sahlins

Recently I asked an anthropologist friend for some recommendations on anthropology readings about kinship. Among other books, he recommended this one, which I promptly bought and read. And I'm glad I did. Sahlins elegantly argues for an understanding of kinship based not on bloodlines, but on culture.

In the Preface, he summarizes the argument: "The specific quality of kinship, I argue, is 'mutuality of being': kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each others' existence; they are members of one another." And "kinship categories are not representations or metaphorical extensions of birth relations; if anything, birth is a metaphor of kinship relations."

This might be a surprising conclusion for people who have read older anthropological works on kinship. (Newer works have largely turned to other concerns, or so my anthropologist friend tells me.) In the early 20th century, the first thing an anthropologist would do was to conduct a census to understand kinship relations; ethnographies in the 1930s focused on kinship, bloodlines, endogamy and exogamy, tribes and moieties. But Sahlins argues that "kinship is not given at birth as such, since human birth is not a pre-discursive fact. A whole series of persons may be bodily instantiated in the newborn child, including lineage and clan ancestors, while even the woman who gave birth is excluded." And "it is not even inevitable that the kinship of procreation is essentially different from relationships created postnatally. Kinship fashioned sociologically may be the same in substance as kinship figured genealogically, made of the same stuff transmitted in procreation"—and here follows a set of examples from various cultures, including "commensality, sharing food, reincarnation, co-residence, shared memories, working together, blood brotherhood, adoption, friendship, shared suffering, and so on." Such "performative modes of kinship" are "predicated on particular cultural logics of relatedness."

Sahlins draws on a wide range of examples from various studies to illustrate, demonstrating that performative forms of kinship (ex: fictive kinship) are just as much kinship as biological kinship. He believes that "kinship could very well be an inherent human possibility," given our "generic symbolic capacity." "Kinship may be a universal possibility in nature, but by the same symbolic token as codified in language and custom, it is always a cultural particularity."

This book cleared up a lot of question marks about kinship for me. Sahlins elegantly and parsimoniously argues for a definition of kinship that encompasses blood relations, fictive kinship, and other sorts of relations. Most importantly from my perspective, Sahlins' definition encompasses the kinship definitions of the studied cultures themselves: it doesn't draw separations between things that the cultures treat as whole phenomena. To put it bluntly, if Culture A allows someone to be spliced into a family as a full member, why should an anthropologist impose a framework of "fictive kinship"?

Great book. And short. Give it a read if you're interested in the phenomenon of kinship.

Reading :: Collaboration

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results
By Morten Hansen

Collaboration is a business book based on Hansen's scholarly work in reaching and understanding teams, conducted during his Ph.D. (Stanford) and his professorship (Harvard Business School). His question: "What is the difference between good and bad collaboration?"

Bad collaboration, he tells us in Chapter 1, is "collaboration characterized by high friction and a poor focus on results." In contrast, he focuses on effective, disciplined companywide collaboration (not, he hastens to add, collaboration outside a company). And "disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required." Furthermore, disciplined collaboration makes it possible to "have it both ways—performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work."

Throughout the book, Hansen walks through the dos and don'ts of collaboration, pitched to leaders in large companies. It's a solid book, full of not just advice but also matrices and structured worksheets. I imagine it would be very helpful for those readers.

Topsight > Discussing Topsight on The WELL

Jon Lebkowsky has been kind enough to set up an author's discussion of my book Topsight on The WELL.  It's a chance for people to lob some questions at me—and a chance for you, dear reader, to get more insight about the book and the approach.

We've also lined up some respondents, who should be weighing in soon. The discussion will be going on through April 4. Swing by anytime. I expect to get some tough questions!

Topsight > Topsight and lifehacking

Financial Times has just posted an article on lifehacking for which I was interviewed. Take a look. Long story short, I discuss how I see lifehacking as a part of a larger system of activity—a part that can potentially lead to disruptions if people's lifehacks cause inconsistencies in the system.

How do we resolve such inconsistencies? I think you know the answer.

Cynefin and TIMN and I-space and CVF and ...

I've been elbow-deep in examining different frameworks for understanding organizations, including TIMN, CVF, I-Space, and Cynefin. To this point, I've considered Cynefin the odd one out, since it (a) focuses on the environment rather than work organization itself, and (b) consequently doesn't use variants of tribes/clans, institutions/bureaucracies, markets/exchanges, and networks/adhocracies.

But today a stray tweet from Harold Jarche brought my attention to the blogwork he and others have done in relating TIMN and Cynefin. I haven't been able to absorb this work yet, so I'm not ready to endorse it, but it certainly looks interesting:

• "First structure the work system" - Jarche
• "Working together" - Jarche
• "Combined models for pattern recognition" - Tom Haskins (Tom, I think I saw this earlier but lost the thread!)
• "Networks thrive in complexity" - Jarche

As so often happens, people are approaching some of the same problems from different directions—and in some cases, via different measures. As Dave Snowden points out elsewhere, one reason that so many of these frameworks are quadriform is that they emerge from 2x2 matrices. (For instance, in its early days, Cynefin was built on two axes: restricted/open and learning/training.) 

And here I want to inject a note of caution. It's easy to start thinking on the basis of these multiple quadriform frameworks that there's simply four forms—to mistake the map for the territory, so to speak. And once you make that assumption, it's tempting to make straightforward equivalences among the frameworks. 

I don't think any of the authors linked above are doing that, but at the beginning of my investigations, that was my impulse. Now I'm taking a second look at them, reining in that impulse and trying to discern the differences among the frameworks. There are some important lessons here, but also pitfalls. 

Finally, let me bring this back to my home discipline, rhetoric. As I argued a few years ago, understanding the complexities of such models can help rhetoricians, I think. And that's because what is persuasive can change in different sociocultural environments—but we often examine persuasion as if it is founded on eternal principles. We expect arguments to be coherent, well-structured in terms of logos, supplemented appropriately by pathos and ethos. And those characteristics do describe a well-formed argument—for an early-institutional society such as ancient Greece. Do they describe a well-formed argument for a TIMN society? For a company working in the Complex environment described in Cynefin? For an adhocracy in I-space? 

CCCC 2013 presentation

Here's my presentation for CCCC 2013, describing how I used social media to supplement more traditional qualitative research data in two recent projects.

Reading :: The Evolution of Political Society

The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political AnthropologyBy Morton H. Fried

In this 1967 book, Morton Fried examines what was then known about how politics evolved in societies. He follows societal development through simple egalitarian societies, rank societies, stratified societies, and finally the state.

First, some definitions. Fried defines "culture" as "the totality of conventional behavioral responses acquired primarily by symbolic learning" (p.7). To define "society," he quotes Abrele et al. 1950: "A society is a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action which is capable of existing longer than the life-span of an individual, the group being recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of its members" (p.8).

And a caution. We don't know a lot about political society in pre-state societies, simply because every society we can observe has already been contacted by the state to some extent—and the ones with the least contact live in atypical environments. "Simple extrapolation from observations of Eskimo, Bushman, or other cultures in marginal habitats to paleolithic cultures in the Pleistocene is dangerous" (p.38). But, he says, we can draw some conclusions despite these limitations (p.38).

The earliest known societies were egalitarian—but, Fried tells us, that doesn't mean they were wholly equal: "Equality is a social impossibility" (p.27). Indeed, "all known societies do create status hierarchies" (p.32). Nevertheless, we can call some societies egalitarian: "An egalitarian society is one in which there are as many positions of prestige in any given age-sex grade as there are persons capable of filling them" (p.33).

In simple egalitarian societies (Ch.3), ranking and stratification are unknown. "Ranking exists when there are fewer positions of valued status than persons capable of filling them. A rank society has means of limiting the access of its members to status positions that they would otherwise hold on the basis of sex, age, or personal attributes" (p.52). "Stratification, by contrast, is a term that is preferably limited to status differences based on economic differences. Stratification in this sense is a system by which the adult members of a society enjoy differential rights of access to basic resources"(p.52).

So how does a simple society operate without ranking and stratification? Fried argues that most simple societies developed in less hostile environments (p.53), with very low population density (pp.54-55), with simple means of production (such as tools made from natural materials and common hunting groups; pp.58-59); with a broad division of labor between the sexes, but general competence in all roles within that division of labor (p.62); with distribution relationships based on reciprocity (pp.63-64). The general social structure is of two types: the family (generally nuclear) and the band ("a local group composed of a small number of families," p.67). Leaders can't compel (p.83), and military pursuits demonstrate "a complete absence of command or coordination" (pp.104-105).

In rank societies (Ch.4), "positions of valued status are somehow limited so that not all those of sufficient talent to occupy such statuses actually achieve them" (p.109). The spectrum of such societies is greater than that of simple egalitarian societies (p.110). Interestingly, while egalitarian bands are inevitably hunter-gatherers, rank societies are usually agricultural (p.110). A domestic food supply means a more certain, concentrated food supply, leading to larger, more permanent communities, resulting in a more formalized kinship network (p.116). A major development in such a society is a clearly distinguished descent principle (p.116). And although reciprocity continues to be an important redistributionist principle, "in rank societies, the major process of economic integration is redistribution, in which there is a characteristic flow of goods into and out from a finite center. Invariably that center is the pinnacle of a smaller component network within a larger structure" (p.117).

As noted above, kinship begins to play a more important role in rank society (p.120). Whereas in band society, the ideology is that of coresidence, in rank society, the ideology is that of kinship (p.121). But the specific kinship system can vary considerably across rank societies (p.121). Unilateral descent groups—clans—are taken to be descended from some stipulated common ancestor (p.124); the clan structure tends to be inclusive rather than exclusive, sometimes even incorporating members who are clearly alien but now assimilated, and its key challenge is "to clarify the relative kinship statuses of the members so that they may act properly toward each other" (p.125). In contrast to clans is the lineage, which is structurally similar to the clan but involves demonstrating relationship "to all the other members of the lineage" (p.125).

Again, leadership in the rank society is of the command-not-control variety; the chief cannot force compliance (p.137).

Near the end of his section on rank society, Fried gives us a miniature version of the argument against tribe that he develops more fully in his later book. "If I had to select one word in the vocabulary of anthropology as the single most egregious case of meaninglessness, I would have to pass over 'tribe' in favor of 'race.' I am sure, however, that 'tribe' figures prominently on the list of putative technical terms ranked in order of degree of ambiguity" (p.154). Tribalism, he says, resembles and overlaps racism (p.156).

In stratified societies (Ch.5), "members of the same sex and equivalent age status do not have equal access to the basic resources that sustain life" (p.186). Once a society is stratified, the state is not far behind (p.185).

In Chapter 6, we finally get to the state. All contemporary states, he says, are secondary; no pristine states remain (p.231), that is, no states that developed directly from stratified societies. "The state... is a collection of specialized institutions and agencies, some formal and others informal, that maintains an order of stratification. Usually its point of concentration is on the basic principles of organization: hierarchy, differential degrees of access to basic resources, obedience to officials, and defense of the area"(p.235).

Let's leave it there. Many books examine the development of the state, but Fried provides a survey that compares societal arrangements across different points of development. (Granted, the survey is 45 years old.) I found the book to be interesting, though dry in spots, and well worth the time if you're looking for an introduction to the evolution of political society.

Reading :: The Notion of Tribe

The notion of tribe
By Morton H. Fried

This text was published in 1975 (with a groovy 1975 cover, I should add). It's a slim text, but slim in a good way: concise, focused on its thesis:

Although we are accustomed to think about the most ancient forms of human society in terms of tribes, firmly defined and bounded units of this sort actually grew out of the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations by more complexly organized societies. The invention of the state, a tight, class-structured political and economic organization, began a process whereby vaguely defined and grossly overlapping populations were provided with the minimal organization required for their manipulation, even though they had little or no internal organization of their own other than that based on conceptions of kinship. The resultant form was that of the tribe. (Preface, unnumbered page). 

That is, although we often think of tribes as representing a sort of organization that precedes the State, Fried argues that tribes actually result from the contact between states and less complexly organized societies. Indeed, "tribes, as conventionally conceived, are not closely bounded populations in either territorial or demographic senses. They are not economically and politically integrated and display political organization under hierarchical leaders only as a result of contact with already existing states, although such contact may be quite indirect" (Preface, unnumbered page).

Fried goes on to trace the roots of the term—and concept—of tribe (Chapter 1), demonstrating that in its roots in the Latin tribus and the Greek phyle, it was consistently applied by states to groups outside the state.

The rest of the chapters then address different applications of the concept. For instance, in Chapter 2, Fried examines how "tribe" has been applied to breeding populations, laying out the evidence that (for instance) supposedly endogamous tribes aren't strictly endogamous (p.14). In Chapter 5, Fried attacks the notion of tribe as economic system, demonstrating that "there was no tribal mode of production in pre-state societies" (p.47). In Chapter 9, he questions the understanding of tribes as ideological groups, arguing that "all self-declared tribes are secondary tribes"—tribes that are named and delineated after "contact with state-organized societies" (p.74). Indeed, Fried argues that "pre-state social structures were more frequently open than closed, and generally looser knit rather than tightly woven (so much so, in terms of economic and political organization, as to lack clear-cut boundaries, except in unusual circumstances)" (p.76).

Although it's a slim book, Fried marshalls a broad array of evidence for this thesis. Importantly, Fried doesn't see himself as convincing cultural anthropologists—who had long ago abandoned the idea of tribe (p.11)—but rather physical anthropologists and the general public.

If you're interested in the concept of tribe, this slim book is well worth your time—if you can find a copy. The UT library had one, but I see that copies go for $99 on Amazon. That's about 73 cents per page!

Topsight > Discussing Topsight with Gregory Zobel

This Thursday, March 14 at about 3pm Mountain Time, Greg Zobel will be interviewing me about Topsight. You can watch us live on UStream. Better yet, you can ask questions, which we'll answer in the second half of the show. Interactive video, my friends.

The Society for Technical Communication's practitioner magazine, Intercom, is pleased to sponsor this 45 minute interview with Dr. Clay Spinuzzi. Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric and writing at The University of Texas at Austin. After publishing two successful texts--one with MIT Press and the other with Cambridge--Spinuzzi has just self-published his new book, Topsight. 

Topsight is practitioner-oriented and accessibly written. Knowledge and information workers will draw useful theory and actionable tools to support their efforts in complex information systems. Academics will find methods and protocols they can use in graduate and undergraduate classes. Technical Communication and Rhetoric academics will find chapters for use in their classes as well as an effective modeling of how academic research can transition into practitioner, and possibly popular selling, texts. 

The first half of the interview will center on Spinuzzi's approach to understanding and adapting complex information environments, like high-tech start-ups, while the second half of the interview will be driven by user and participant questions. The interview will be conducted live at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

The interview will be broadcast live on uStream at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tc-ed-tech-and-accessibility-with-gz

(writers love txt)

Every once in a while, I have a conversation that goes something like this:

Acquaintance: So you've been teaching college students for a while, huh? 

Me: Sure have. (Checks math in head.) Almost ... twenty years. That can't be right! (Checks math again on fingers, feels old.) Yeah, almost twenty.

Acquaintance:  I have a question for you. 

Me: I bet I know what it is. 

Acquaintance: Have you noticed—(dramatic pause)—over the time that you've been teaching—(dramatic pause)—that students are getting worse and worse at writing? 

Me: No, not really. 

Acquaintance: Really? I mean—(dramatic pause)—have you noticed lately that—(dramatic pause)—they are using text speak in their papers?

The acquaintance might use different terms, such as "textspeak" or "text talk" or "SMS language," or perhaps concrete examples (such as "l8r" instead of "later"). In any case, the fear is the same: That our incoming students are becoming more illiterate, communicating through bastardized language, while losing the far superior art of—take your pick—letter writing, journaling, poetry.

Let's untangle this question a bit, because it touches on a lot of different issues.

Writing isn't a unitary phenomenon. Writing is perhaps our most useful and flexible tool, making its way into nearly every aspect of our lives—saturating our lives to a degree that it has never done before. Nearly universal literacy means that the overwhelming majority of elementary school students learn a basic level of reading, writing, and textual problem solving.

Let that sink in. In 1870, 20% of people at or above the age of 14 were illiterate—unable to read or write in any language. By 1979, that number dropped to only 0.6%.

Furthermore, in 1870, the degree ratio for high school was 0.02%—only 2 of every 100 students graduated from high school. In 1970, the degree ratio was 77%. (By 2000 it was a relatively anemic 70%.)

That's something that we often forget. We sometimes look at schoolbooks from the mid-1800s and are tempted to marvel at how much more proficient children were at reading back then. Yes, of the 80% who were not completely illiterate, a substantial percentage learned how to write at remarkable levels. But many of them did not aspire to high levels of competence in writing. Nor did they need to. Even those with high literacy levels mastered a relatively small number of genres (text types) that were useful to social engagements and the lifelong employment they obtained after school.

Even so, writing, which (as you may remember) began as a hacked-together accounting system, developed many more uses as the population became more literate. The dropping costs of writing technology—including pencils, pens, and paper—made writing easier to spread, as did the burgeoning postal system. Writing became incorporated into more and more trades, fields, and disciplines.

And as information and communication technologies (ICTs) came online, and as work changed, the number of genres multiplied. For instance, the business memo evolved from business letters which were deployed within an organization. Email evolved from business memos (and you can still see the traces of the older genre in email headers: to, from, date, subject). And so on.

Here's the thing. Each of these genres is deployed in different situations. Each has carved out its own niche in a larger set of genres. Increasingly, each has to cross borders, as work becomes more intertwined. And since people no longer expect lifelong employment, they often must learn new genres throughout their lives—and they bring some genres from one job to another, piling on even more texts.

But that's not just happening in our work lives. Social networking is growing and diversifying. Last December there were 6.7 billion active mobile subscriptions; these reach 4.3 billion unique human beings, 61% of the planet's population; and 5.6 billion of these subscriptions use texting—more than use voice calls.

Social media and texting are both dominated by writing. When you see a college student walking across campus while staring at her iPhone, rather than wondering why she doesn't look up, think: she, like the rest of her generation, is reading and writing constantly. As she goes through school, graduates, gets a job, then switches careers throughout her life, she is going to constantly learn, use, invent, and convey an enormous number of genres. Rather than writing less, and being less competent in writing, she's writing more, in more venues, in more situations, and in situations that involve more varied audience analysis.

So much for the quantity of writing. But, my acquaintance might ask, how about the quality? Do my students write in text speak?

They don't. To understand why, take a look at a study that Christina Haas and her collaborators published in 2011. The research team analyzed a 32000-word corpus of instant messaging exchanges among 103 college students. Along the way, they noted plenty of inventive spelling and other unusual conventions. Their conclusion?

The understanding that emerged for us was one of young people who have a true mastery of written language: the IM transcripts we studied were funny, clever, innovative, sometimes moving, and almost always delightful. We believe this picture emerged partly because of our inductive approach—to the best of our abilities, we let the language of participants speak to us and speak it did. Our study has revealed that literacy—at once innovative and playful, systematic and purposeful—is alive and well on the Internet and in the lives of the young people who use it. (p.399)

Moreover, the invented spelling and other features of IM didn't bleed into the school writing that students did. Their compositions didn't, for instance, tell professors that they would do something "l8r" or justify something "cuz" or evaluate something as "saweeet." They kept the register of IM separate from the register they use for schoolwork. As do my students. When they use texting, they aren't ruining the language, they're just adapting it to fit the space limitations of 160 characters and the time limitations of near-immediate communication.

If you want to understand how this works, here's a simple experiment you can try. Next time you go to a restaurant, right after you place your order, ask the server if you can see what he or she wrote on the pad. I can almost guarantee you it won't be the item on the menu ("Brick Chicken with Garlic Mashed Potatoes"). Instead, it will probably be an abbreviation that the waitstaff and kitchen staff both understand ("bchx").

And it's not because your waiter can't spell "chicken."

So, no, in my experience students are not writing more badly than they did in 1993. They are, however, writing more frequently, in more situations, involving more audiences, in connection with more additional genres, in anticipation of learning and adapting even more genres during a lifetime of learning. They're preparing for near-constant textual contact, including an increasing number of social layers on top of their work, leisure, and family genres. My students, I admit, don't write and are usually not prepared to write essays similar to those in the McGuffey Readers. But they do write in a mind-boggling range of genres and situations that didn't exist back in the 1800s. That's the challenge for which they're preparing.

(mobility beyond the laptop)

So I'll be appearing in Las Vegas next week at the CCCC conference. The most notable thing about the trip is that, for the first time in over a decade, I won't be bringing a laptop.

Here's the problem with laptops: Flying. Every time I go through airport security, I have to pull my laptop out of my luggage, place it in a separate container, and run it through the X-ray machine. Then I have to retrieve it afterwards. Meanwhile, I'm trying to juggle my shoes, my other luggage, my personal effects, and who knows what else. It's stressful, but I have dealt with it because I need to be able to work on papers, browse, etc. when I travel.

But when I flew back from Germany last November, re-entering domestic security, I heard one of the TSA employees tell the crowd: you can leave your iPads in your luggage. Only laptops need to be separated.

Huh.

Shortly afterwards, I bought a Nexus 10. It was mostly for reading and annotating PDFs, but it does most of what I need for travel purposes as well. It's lighter even than my Macbook Air. It allows me to edit and comment on Google Docs. And it turns out to be a great tool for scheduling and project management—functions that I have traditionally performed on planes anyway.

So, for this upcoming trip, I have decided to leave the Air at home and use smaller, always-on devices: my Galaxy Nexus, my Nexus 10, and—because I prefer to read e-ink and because it's not very heavy—my Kindle Touch. No laptop. No physical keyboard. And, I hope, no stress when going through airport security.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Network > Implications for workers

I ran into a discussion on Twitter yesterday about lean education. At one point, Fredrik Matheson tells his interlocutors that my book Network provides a way to talk about its dilemmas.

True—and although I rarely discuss education per se, the concept of net work is an exception because it's so critical to understanding some of the shifting changes in work and the consequent challenges to education.

In the book, I use the term network to mean a heterogeneous assemblage of materials that make up a sustained, relatively coherent set of activities (p.16). These materials include technologies, texts, people, communications, and so on. "All are material, all are linked in complex and shifting ways, and all are brought to bear on the business of extending and developing the network, that is, bringing more elements into the assemblage and relating them in different ways" (p.16).

Such sociotechnical networks grow and change through net work: "the ways in which the assemblage is enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed; the ways in which knowledge work is strategically and tactically performed in a heavily networked organization" (p.16). In knowledge work organizations (such as the telecommunications company I studied in that book), it's relatively easy to extend these networks in formal and informal ways. That's because, although these organizations also do physical work, most of their work involves circulating, analyzing, and synthesizing information. And information is increasingly inexpensive to circulate (a fact that is beginning to disrupt manufacturing industries and the laws based on their material limitations). So we get a workforce that is increasingly mobile,  increasingly incentivized to work remotely, with increasing opportunities to work in looser arrangements. We get a workforce that is increasingly distributed, increasingly able (and incentivized) to work independently. One which increasingly works in virtual environments and collaborates in virtual teams. One which involves organizations shedding non-core jobs, farming them out to contractors instead. One in which work is more loosely organized.

In knowledge work, strength comes from combining sets of expertise in unique ways. That means crossing borders—borders between fields/disciplines/trades, borders between organizations, borders between countries and agendas. Net workers must be able to learn at least a little bit about each others' work. Furthermore, cross-organizational work often means less leverage over aspects of the work—you can command, but not control, people in different organizations. Temporary, project-based, cross-networked organizations multiply, and they work differently, often tactically rather than strategically.

So what?

The upshot is that successful knowledge work organizations require different things from their employees. As I argue in the last chapter of Network, those with specific characteristics will tend to thrive in these environments:

• Rhetoric. When work reaches across unstable borders, when workers don't have strong leverage over each other, they must "understand how to make arguments, how to persuade, how to build trust and stable alliances, how to negotiate and bargain and horse-trade across boundaries" (p.201). In particular, trust-building can be a hard nut to crack, but it's essential to smoothly functioning collaborative communities. 
• Time management. Net work often involves work fragmentation too. At Telecorp, the telecommunications company I studied, people could interrupt each others' work at any time—and that tendency has only strengthened in the studies I've conducted since then. Put a phone in everyone's pocket and you get the potential to form ad hoc teams at the drop of a hat. So "Workers must be able to adopt or adapt ways to deal with work fragmentation, including genres and rules that allow them to create their own stable transformations ... for prioritizing, organizing, and achieving work" (p.201). The more work becomes networked, the more individuals tend to take on the burden of managing their own time—and the more they need essential time management skills.
• Project management. Similarly, net work involves project management. In fact, "projectification" is an essential characteristic of cross-functional and cross-organizational work. And cross-functional or cross-organizational teams, which tend to be oriented around projects, tend to require rotating leadership in which people from different specializations take the lead during different phases. That means that the essentials of project management become vital.
• Adaptability. Finally, and implied by the other points, people have to be adaptable. As work becomes more projectified, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational, it requires more adaptability from its workers—workers who must be adaptable enough to learn about each others' work, organize around different projects, and adapt new technologies and practices and genres. 

What does this mean for education? 

I hesitate to recommend full-bore changes such as scrapping college completely, moving hastily to MOOCs, or throwing up new programs quickly. These approaches all have problems, foremost of which is the fact that none of them get at the cross-disciplinary, cross-organizational skills I describe above. MOOCs in particular seem optimized for conveying codified knowledge, but not for building the skills above—which is to say that they currently lack the give-and-take interaction that tends to characterize innovative organizations. Certainly they haven't (yet) been generally articulated in a way that encourages cross-disciplinary work, project-oriented virtual teams, or the rhetorical engagement and strategies that can make knowledge work effective. 

At the same time, university education does tend to be balkanized, with some disciplines barely interacting with others. Classes are often treated as silos. And even classes in rhetoric often focus their projects on civic engagement (read: op-ed columns) to the exclusion of essential cross-organizational skills. 

That's partly why I am so excited about our Human Dimensions of Organizations program at UT, in which working professionals learn and apply the liberal arts to wicked problems in their own organizations. As a cross-disciplinary program, HDO promises to connect the insights of different disciplines, with a heavy emphasis on understanding how people think and operate—and how decision-makers can be convinced of solid, ethical arguments for change. As a program for working professionals, HDO is ultimately application-focused; by drawing on their own deep experience with organizations, these students keep us honest and, I expect, will challenge our preconceptions as much as we will challenge theirs. And as a program ending with a capstone course, HDO will provide a concrete takeaway—a demonstration project that allows students to synthesize their work throughout the curriculum to solve an actual problem and yield actual gains.

HDO isn't a template for the future of education writ large. But it's one measured response to the deep changes we've seen in work over the last forty-odd years, changes to which education must be responsive. 

Reading :: Korea as a Knowledge Economy

Korea As a Knowledge Economy: Evolutionary Process and Lessons Learned By Joonghae Suh and Derek H. C. Chen

This book, published by the Korea Development Institute and the World Bank Institute, overviews Korea's economic growth from the 1960s through 2007 (when the book was published). Full of facts and figures, the book describes how the Republic of Korea has developed (Chapter 2), the challenges to its development strategies (Chapter 3), its economic framework (Chapter 4), its information and communication technologies (Chapter 5), how it's meeting skill and human resource requirements (Chapter 6), and how it's encouraging and leveraging science and technology (Chapter 7).

The book is based on the World Bank's knowledge economy (KE) framework, with four pillars:

• "an economic incentive and institutional regime"
• "an educated and skilled labor force"
• "an effective innovation system"
• "a modern and adequate information infrastructure" (p.4)

And it's filled with bar charts and line graphs that show metrics leaping upward as time goes on. The ROK has enjoyed remarkable growth, particularly in the penetration of information technologies and telecommunications. It has also begun to address some of its structural limitations. For instance, until recently, universities did not focus on application (p.123) and applied research was left to government research institutions and the private sector (p.127); more recently, that situation has changed.

In all, the book is long on figures, and it paints a picture of remarkable progress and optimism. I'm not sure how to evaluate that picture, but it does seem to accord with other literature I've read about the ROK. 

Reading :: Crisis and Change

Crisis and Change: South Korea in a Post-1997 New Era
By Jasper Kim

A few days ago, I reviewed Steinberg's The Republic of Korea, which detailed ROK history up to 1989. But some significant things have happened since 1989—especially the year 1997, a watershed year that saw a dramatic financial crisis and, consequently, deep changes across critical sectors of the ROK (p.11). In this 2005 book, Jasper Kim discusses the changes wrought in economic policy (Chapter 3), law (Chapter 4), politics (Chapter 5), foreign policy (Chapter 6), social change (Chapter 7),  infrastructure (Chapter 8), and education (Chapter 9). The changes are deep, by Kim's account, and generally very positive.

In Kim's account, "the pre-1997 [1961-1997] Old Order Korean economy was largely based on government-led economic development," and the close ties "fostered crony capitalism" (p.17). He documents the rise of the chaebols (p.18), including the dynamic in which the government provided the chaebols with financial aid and took on the financial risk, insulating the chaebols from the ramifications of their business decisions (pp.18-19). Politically, the Old Order was largely drawn from the Gyeoungsang province; the executive branch dominated the others; and politics were dominated by men, with little space for "female participation in society, especially in the political scene" (p.20). The Old Order, Kim says, was based on factionalism (p.22).

The 1997 financial crisis upended the Old Order. For one thing, crony capitalism took much of the blame for the crisis, and reforms in the "financial and corporate sectors, capital markets, and securities regulation" resulted in an economy that was "more closely integrated into the global economy" (p.31). For another, ideology changed: the executive branch was no longer considered untouchable (p.32) and the Internet destroyed government-journalism collusion (p.33). In foreign policy, the ROK "has acquired a more equal footing with respect to Korea-U.S. relations" due to its "sunshine policy" toward North Korea (a split with the US) (p.34), but abetted by other factors, such as the US' 2004 decision to pull 1/3 of its troops from ROK, as well as new military hardware tech (p.35).

Beyond these, the social sector has changed considerably, creating a split in perceptions between pre-war and post-war generations: The post-war generations have grown up in a world in which the ROK is an industrial power, a member of the UN, a high-tech heavyweight, and a producer of Pacific region pop culture (p.37).

Overall, this is an optimistic and hopeful book about the ROK. If you're interested in the country, take a look.

Reading :: The Republic of Korea

The Republic of Korea: Economic Transformation and Social Change
By David I. Steinberg

Writing in 1989, David Steinberg describes the history and economic transformation of the Korean peninsula, focusing on the Republic of Korea (also known as South Korea). Bear in mind that the book is written before the pivotal year of 1997, when an economic crisis set in motion far-reaching changes in how the Republic governs itself and manages its economy.

It's no easy task to summarize the history of a culture that spans 4000BC to the present day, but Steinberg does a credible job. After some introductory work, he covers early history (Chapter 3), traditional Korea from 1392-1904 (Chapter 4), the Japanese colonial period of 1904-1945 (Chapter 5), and the six Korean republics from 1945-1989 (Chapter 6). The remainder of the book describes Korean history and culture (Chapter 7), its politics and administration (Chapter 8), the role of the military (Chapter 9), its economic development from 1953-1986 (Chapter 10), its external relations (Chapter 11), and its future (Chapter 12).

Steinberg obviously has great affection for Korea—which I appreciated—but he doesn't minimize its difficulties. Nevertheless, the book ends on a positive note, one that foresaw some of the extraordinarily positive developments that the ROK has achieved since 1989.

Let's pick out some highlights. Korean culture seems to have taken "the clan as the basic element of social organization" since the late Neolithic (p.20). Although the Korean peoples appear to have descended from Siberians (p.19), Korea was strongly influenced and often dominated by China from 194 BC onward (p.21). The Han Dynasty conquered Korea in 108 BC, establishing the Lolang (or Nangnang) period, which "lasted several hundred years" (p.21). And "During this period, there developed a set of tribally organized states or groupings that eventually fused into what has become Korea. These were Puyo in the north and Mahan, Chinhan, and Pyonhan in the south" (p.21). Korea developed three city-states: Koguryo (founded 37 BC), Paekche (founded 18 BC), and Silla (founded 57 BC). Once "Koguryo ousted the Chinese in 313" (p.21), these city-states developed into the "three kingdoms," eventually uniting under Silla (p.22).

Korea, located near China and Siberia on one side and Japan on the other, acted as "a transmission belt, receiving and exporting culture and technology in the region" (p.22). Japan received much of its early culture, including Buddhism and art, through Paechke (p.22).

Steinberg says:

All three kingdoms showed a strong tendency toward patrilinial and hierarchical power. All were centralized, aristocratic states, with a very strong tradition, perhaps best known in Silla but apparently common in the area, of rank based on hereditary principles. In Silla, this was called "bone rank," and it influenced all forms of social and political behavior. The Silla aristocracy was organized into gradations of seventeen ranks, with only the top rankings allowed to have effective power. (p.25)

Indeed, as Steinberg later explains in the chapter on politics and administration, "Hierarchy is integral to the Confucian tradition and exceptionally pervasive. ... This sense of hierarchy is reflected in the Korean language itself, which like Japanese (but unlike Chinese) requires a complex system of grammatic and lexographic honorifics that expressly designate the relative status of each person referred to or involved in a conversation" (p.93). But hierarchy goes beyond the Confucian tradition:

The pre-Confucian social order was, in fact, more hierarchical than the Confucian ideal. Early Korean states were organized along rigid class differentiations based on "bone rank," or a hereditary system that eventually evolved into the yangban system. In this class of both civilian and military gentry, the civilians dominated. The yangban—the backbone of the political, governmental, moral, and social order—originally claimed status on the basis of aristocratic lineage, and then on their scholastic, and thus bureaucratic, standing. (p.93)

In fact, only the yangban could take the examinations that would allow them entry into the bureaucracy, resulting in a self-perpetuating upper class.

Steinberg saw this strong bureaucratic tradition as influencing Korea up to his day. In fact, he says, "The existence of an autonomous private sector in Korea, whether it be in education or in business, is arguable; nongovernmental or quasi-governmental might be a more accurate description of this sector. Public-private collaboration, with government in the lead, is the most usual form of action" (p.96). Furthermore, "power is generally considered finite," making power a zero-sum game: "to share power is to diminish one's power and one's position; to delegate it is to lose it" (p.98).

Understanding that tendency helps us to understand the chaebol, the clan-based conglomerates (e.g.,  Samsung, LG, Hyundai, SK) that developed during the Park regime of 1961-1979. "Because the chaebol were in debt to government-sponsored or approved institutions for more than four times the value of their equity assets (much higher than the debt of average Korean concerns and far higher than that of most compatible firms in other countries), state direction and intervention, culturally reinforced by traditional Korean and Confucian concepts of state power, were pronounced" (p.135).

Steinberg discusses a great deal more, including the sometimes rocky internal relations of the ROK and the similarly strained relations with the US and Japan. But let's leave the book here. It's a solid, sympathetic book that crams an improbable amount of information into its 218 pages. If you're interested in the history and culture of the ROK—up to 1989—this is a good place to start.